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Dictionaries in Python

Python’s way of storing key-value pairs, a fundamental data structure in computer science. The data type is summarized in the official documentation as “an unordered set of key: value pairs, with the requirement that the keys are unique”. Dictionaries can be indexed by any immutable data type and the stored values accessed in the following ways:

value = d.get[key]
value = d.get(key)
value = d.get(key, "no data")

Whereas using [key] will return a KeyError if the key does not exist, the .get method will either return None, or a default value if specified as an optional parameter. Values within nested dictionaries, such as deserialized JSON data, can be accessed by the successive use of [key] or .get(key):

When the keys are simple strings, it can be useful to pass in the keys as keywords to the dict() constructor. This is the most performant way of creating dictionaries and useful for the generation of arbitrary keys and values. Using the zip function inside the dict() constructor is particularly useful for creating dictionaries from lists of keys and values.

Dictionaries are unordered, except in Python 3.6+. To store the insertion order of keys, the dictionary sub-class OrderedDict can be used after importing it from the collections module in the standard library.